Chris Young, a former computer help-desk technician living in
Denver, woke up one morning in June 2004 barely able to move
the right side of his body. He felt spasms in the muscles
between his ribs and a painful squeezing in his torso. When
he tried to walk, he had trouble lifting his right foot. "I
was scared out of my mind," he recalls. A few days later, an
MRI scan confirmed what Young already suspected from looking
up his symptoms on the Internet: He had multiple sclerosis
(MS), a chronic disease in which the body attacks its own
nerve fibers. The day of the diagnosis was his 29th
birthday.

As his symptoms worsened over the next few years, Young
frequently visited Internet forums for MS patients. In
October 2007, a forum member described a new clinical trial
at Johns Hopkins: Researchers would be testing
cyclophosphamide, a chemotherapy drug ordinarily used to
treat cancer, on patients with severe MS symptoms. By now
Young had tried every known MS drug and nothing had helped.
"I was dropping like a rock at that point," Young says. "So
I figured, what have I got to lose?" He called the clinical
trial's sponsor, Hopkins neurologist Doug
Kerr, and was accepted for the study. On March 13, he was
wheeled into Johns Hopkins Hospital to begin four days of
intense chemotherapy.

Hopkins neurologist Doug Kerr thought HiCy might "reboot"
an MS patient's immune system, allowing nerve cells to repair
themselves. "The ideas was to get rid of the inflammation
entirely, in one fell swoop. When the immune system comes
back up, we hoped, it would begin to behave
better."

Before the treatment, Young's abysmal short-term memory had
him trapped in a state of fuzziness similar, he says, to what
students feel after pulling an all-nighter. His wife would
make lists to help him remember even two or three items-and
he would promptly forget where he put the lists. Five days
after treatment, Young woke up in the middle of the night and
"everything was crystal clear," he recalls. The fog had
lifted. "It was the freshest nap I've ever had."

Within a week of treatment, he could stand in a bathtub
without having to hang on to the walls. Three months after
that, he was walking without a cane.

Researchers began testing low-dose, long-term
cyclophosphamide treatments in the 1980s. But that approach
came with serious side effects. "It took the edge off
inflammation, but it also made patients much more susceptible
to infection, and even tumors," explains Kerr.

He and Hopkins colleagues Richard Jones and Robert Brodsky
had for years used high doses of cyclophosphamide, given over
just a few days, on hundreds of patients with various
autoimmune disorders such as aplastic anemia and lupus. In
those patients, "HiCy" therapy reversed disease progression
with minimal toxicity. Kerr thought HiCy might "reboot" an MS
patient's immune system, allowing nerve cells to repair
themselves. "The idea was to get rid of the inflammation
entirely, in one fell swoop," Kerr says. "When the immune
system comes back up, we hoped, it would begin to behave
better."

They were right. Of the first nine patients they treated with
a high dose of cyclophosphamide, seven had a reduction in
disability after two years. The results were published in
June in the Archives of Neurology. Twenty-nine
patients, including Young, have now been enrolled in a second
trial, with similar motor improvements and no adverse drug
effects so far.

"In most therapies for MS, the goal is only to make the
disease slow down a little bit. Here, people actually got
better," says hematologist and oncologist Douglas Gladstone
of Hematology Oncology Associates of Western Suffolk, in New
York. Additional research by Gladstone, who served a
fellowship at Hopkins in the late 1990s, has also shown the
effectiveness of HiCy on 14 MS patients. "This potentially
represents a new standard of care," he adds.

The next step for HiCy development will be a phase-3, blinded
clinical trial at multiple centers, Kerr says. For those
patients whose disease did not go completely quiet with HiCy
therapy, his team is also working on combination drug
therapies that could be used after HiCy to increase its
effectiveness. "These results are quite encouraging, but we
certainly need to go further," he says. "This is only the
first generation of trials."— Virginia Hughes, A&S '06 (MA)

Richard Conn Henry's extraterrestrial epiphany came two years
ago, at the Space Telescope
Science Institute, a NASA research outpost on Johns
Hopkins' Homewood campus. An old friend, Ed Weiler, now
NASA's chief of science, was giving a talk in which he cast
Earth's story as a science fiction tale viewed from a faraway
galaxy. Suddenly, The Idea smashed into Henry like an
asteroid. Henry, a professor of physics in the Krieger
School of Arts and Sciences, recalls, "Ed said that in his
story, there's this civilization somewhere in the galaxy that
learned about our existence from observing the transit of our
planet across the sun. I'm sitting there thinking, 'Holy
smokes! Now I know where to look for other civilizations in
the universe!'"

Clementine star tracker camera image showing celestial
bodies along the ecliptic plane: (from right to left) the
moon lit by earthshine, the sun's corona rising over the
moon's dark horizon, and the planets Saturn, Mars, and
Mercury. Richard Conn Henry thinks the ecliptic plane is the
place to look for extraterrestrial life.
Photo courtesy NASA

For more than 60 years, scientists have combed the skies for
optical or radio signals from those hypothetical other
civilizations. An aphorism coined during the 1950s by famed
physicist Enrico Fermi — "Where is everybody?" —
cast a spotlight on the search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence, which has grown into a bona fide field of
astronomical research known by the acronym SETI. Henry
believes that if alien societies exist and are situated along
the "ecliptic plane," which is the plane of Earth's orbit
extended through the Milky Way galaxy to infinity, they
might, as Weiler proposed, have noticed the circling Earth
transposed against the sun. If those faraway (and presumably
technologically advanced) civilizations studied our planet,
they might have noted that Earth is bathed in life-sustaining
oxygen, and perhaps sent radio waves in our direction hoping
to contact other beings — us.

"My supposition is that if civilizations elsewhere have seen
us through the ecliptic plane, they will have tried to
contact us," says Henry. "If we find that they haven't after
a while, then we'll likely know they're not out there." By
limiting the search, Henry hopes to increase the chances for
contact with The Great Beyond. "What we're doing is narrowing
it down," says Henry, who compares parsing the ecliptic plane
to finding a needle in a haystack by concentrating on the
part of the haystack where you dropped the needle. "It's not
done all that often. What we [ordinarily] see are scientists
looking at the nearest stars, which I don't agree with
because if civilizations were there, we certainly would have
heard from them by now."

The Hopkins physicist and two other scientists — Seth
Shostak, of the SETI Institute, a private research
organization in Mountain View, California, and Steven
Kilston, a researcher now with the Henry Foundation, a family
foundation run by Henry to promote scientific education
— independently came up with the idea. The trio created
a stir at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting
in June by constructing a poster noting that inhabitants of
any planet situated within a fraction of a degree of the
ecliptic plane could detect Earth passing in front of the sun
every year. Were scientists to limit a SETI search to those
planets, they could narrow the focus to 3 percent of the sky.
The trio has put in a request for time on the Allen Telescope
Array, a radio wave-sensitive device run by the SETI
Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, to
search for transmissions within the ecliptic plane.

Henry has spent much of his 40-year career at Hopkins
studying cosmic diffuse background radiation — rays in
the universe that give hints as to its origins and physical
makeup. But every now and again, "SETI finds me — I get
drawn into it," he says. His hope is that a planet some
10,000 light-years away will have transmitted a signal and
that earthbound scientists will detect it. But, he adds, that
signal would now be 10,000 years old — perhaps from a
species that no longer exists. "The odds that we find some
civilization that is around our age and state of development
are extremely rare, given all the possibilities," Henry says.
Which is to say that, even if aliens have tried to contact
us, we might still be all alone.— Michael Anft

As a young cardiologist, Victor Almon McKusick,
Med '46*,
became fascinated by Marfan syndrome, a disorder that affects
a small group of especially long and lean people, many of
whom ultimately die of a ruptured aorta. But it wasn't the
involvement of the heart's main artery that captured his
interest. It was genetics. McKusick made a career U-turn to
study inherited diseases such as Marfan in hope of uncovering
the genetic secrets behind them.

Victor McKusick
Photo by Keith Weller

Some colleagues "thought I was committing professional
suicide in leaving cardiology to focus on rare and
unimportant genetic disorders," he would later recall.

But McKusick, who died of cancer July 22 at age 86, was ahead
of his time. He became one of the first physicians in the
country to start a medical genetics clinic, which opened at
Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1957. Throughout the next several
decades, he would become a world leader in mapping genes and
identifying those responsible for thousands of inherited
diseases, including a prevalent type of muscular dystrophy
and several forms of dwarfism. More than 30 years before the
sequencing of genes was laid out in 2001, he called for the
complete mapping of the human genome, seeing it as a valuable
tool in predicting and treating a host of illnesses.

McKusick has long been regarded widely as a founding father
of genetics research. His 1966 compilation of inherited
disease genes — Mendelian Inheritance in Man
— is now in its 12th edition, and has grown to three
volumes that are continuously updated on the Internet.

A genial, sometimes jolly figure on campus, McKusick

remained active until last year as University Professor of
Medical Genetics. His 60-year legacy at Hopkins lives on
through scientists who continue to unlock the genetic
underpinnings of disease, some of whom perform their work at
the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic
Medicine. This Hopkins research center bears his name and
that of the late Daniel Nathans, a Nobel laureate and fellow
Hopkins genetics researcher.— MA

This much could be gleaned from one day spent observing
Marina Piccinini's flute master class at Peabody
Conservatory: If you aspire to be a flautist of the first
rank, you need a deep knowledge of the standard repertoire.
You should know practice books by heart. You should stand up
straight and always be in control of your air stream. Don't
be too reverent. Be expressive. Practice kung fu.

Marina Piccinini has taught flute master classes in Zurich
for decades. This summer, for the first time she conducted a
five-day class at Peabody.
Photo by Marco Borggreve

Piccinini, a
Peabody faculty artist and director of the conservatory's
flute program, lives part time in Europe and began leading
annual master classes in Zurich, Switzerland, 10 years ago.
But she wanted a class that more American students could
attend, so this year for the first time she conducted a
master class at Peabody. On June 1, 18 students from around
the country, including four high school musicians, checked
into the conservatory for five days of intense study and
performance.

On their second full day, students found seats in Griswold
Hall for the morning session. Piccinini took the stage,
surveyed the group, and said, "Is there an allergy to the
first row?" A few people chuckled and moved closer to the
stage. One by one, each student performed a piece of his or
her choosing, standing onstage beside the seated Piccinini
and accompanist Colette Valentine. A young woman named
Katrina King played J. S. Bach's Sonata in C major. Piccinini
listened, applauded with the audience, then asked King if she
knew how to ride a bicycle. "Right now," Piccinini said,
"you're on training wheels with your air stream." She pointed
out a C that had sounded a bit flat because King was running
out of air, and suggested that she stand more upright and not
bob around so much while playing. "Whenever you do something
physical, you change the music," Piccinini said.

All morning, for any piece, the teacher could demonstrate
passages from memory, not just for standard works by Bach or
Mozart but compositions by Sigfrid Karg-Elert and Jacques
Ibert and Pierre-Octave Ferroud. She knew the standard
exercise books so well she could recommend specific lessons.
When she examined the sheet music King used for the Bach
sonata, Piccinini noted that many of the articulation and
dynamic markings, added decades after Bach by an editor, were
incorrect for baroque music. "Buy clean copies not marked up
by editors," she advised the room.

At the end of the day, after two rehearsal sessions, four
hours with Piccinini, plus a two-hour piccolo class with
Peabody faculty member Laurie Sokoloff, about 10 shy but game
students assembled in a Peabody dance studio for a much
different lesson. Piccinini is a dedicated martial arts
student who believes musicians, whose work involves
considerable stress from holding the same physical position
for hours at a time, benefit from training in disciplines
like yoga, kung fu, and tai chi. For her Peabody class, she
imported from Vienna her friend and fellow advanced martial
arts student Oluwafemi Oladeji to teach classes in breath
control and relaxation. He led the students in breathing
exercises and various stretches and movements to work out
tension. "If you do not like pain," Oladeji told them,
"breathe and ask it to leave." The students did their best,
sweating in the hot studio and laughing a little as they
began to feel less awkward. "Move. Shake. Shake," Oladeji
advised. "It's your body, let it go. Relax. Relax." They let
it go, they relaxed, and after 90 minutes they raced off to
dinner.— Dale Keiger

In the face of soaring utility costs, Johns Hopkins has
decided to take energy production into its own hands and get
a little greener in the process. Next year, the university
plans to build a cogeneration power plant on the Homewood
campus to supply a significant portion of the campus's energy
needs. The plant will generate 3.5 megawatts of electricity,
roughly 20 percent of the campus's current peak
requirements.

In 2007, the university paid energy suppliers an eye-popping
$10 million to keep the lights on. David Ashwood, director of
plant operations for the Homewood campus, says the proposed
new plant, which will run on natural gas, could save $1.5
million annually and pay for itself in less than five years.
"This is a significant money-saver for us," Ashwood says. "We
looked into cogeneration as far back as 2000. What made this
more viable [now] is that fuel and electricity prices have
gone up dramatically in recent years. The economics never
made sense until now."

"Cogeneration" refers to creation of both power and heat.
Ashwood described the plant as a small jet engine. Natural
gas spins a turbine that drives a generator that creates
electricity. Meanwhile, a heat recovery unit captures the
"engine's" exhaust to make 20,000 pounds of steam per hour.
The steam will be used to heat the Homewood campus's water
and its buildings, power coolers for air conditioning, and
provide steam to kitchens in campus dormitories and the
Hopkins Club.

The new plant, an addition to the existing campus power
house, will be built on the parking deck next to Whitehead
Hall. The university expects to put out a request for bid in
January 2009. If all goes as planned, construction will begin
the following March and the plant will come online in October
2009. State-issued bonds will help cover the plant's $7.5
million cost.

Because the plant will run on natural gas, Ashwood says it
could provide emergency power to a significant portion of
campus and critical facilities in the event of a blackout.
"Fortunately, gas outages are very rare," he says. He also
likes the plant's environmental aspects. It will reduce the
campus's carbon footprint because the university will
purchase less electricity from regional coal-burning power
plants. Ashwood says the new plant should allow the
university to turn off the power house boilers during the
summer months.

Nationwide, dozens of universities have gone the cogeneration
route, including Cornell, Rice, Princeton, and the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Johns Hopkins will be the
second university in the state to have its own cogeneration
plant. The University of Maryland constructed a $70 million,
27-megawatt plant in 2003 to help reduce its own massive
energy bill in College Park.— Greg Rienzi

Thomas LaVeist first heard the buzz in health care circles
about cultural competency in the early 1990s. Hospitals faced
no end of challenges in dealing more effectively with people
from a wide array of cultures. One day, it might be a patient
who believes his bacterial infection has a spiritual cause
and asks that his treatment include drinking green tea. The
next day might bring a female patient from a culture in which
women feel uncomfortable disrobing in front of male doctors.
Such challenges dovetailed with his interest in studying race
disparities in health care outcomes. But LaVeist, now
director of the Bloomberg
School of Public Health's Center for Health Disparities
Solutions, was skeptical. Cultural competency was so loosely
defined. Could it be measured? How could hospitals monitor
how they were doing?

"Cultural competency means looking at a patient's beliefs,
values, how they perceive illness, their views about when to
seek medical care.

LaVeist had crafted other assessment tools, including one to
measure patients' appraisals of racism in health care. He
decided to tackle cultural competency, and spent four years
developing a tool for hospitals and other health care
organizations that would gauge whether they are providing
quality care to ethnically and culturally diverse patients.
Called the Cultural Competency Organizational Assessment-360
(COA360), the tool is a comprehensive Web-based questionnaire
that measures how well hospitals are meeting the needs of
patients of different races, nationalities, religions, and
tribal affiliations.

Here's how it works: Department administrators at a hospital
answer 85 questions on the COA360 Web site about their
perceptions of how well their organization interacts with
diverse patients. Questions include: How well does the health
care organization deal with the language needs of its
clients/patients? How well does it deal with cultural
differences? Physicians, nurses, and staff answer a subset of
those questions. So do patients or their family members, and
people who live in the hospital's service area. Furthermore,
an administrator completes a 113-question statistical survey.
The answers and data are then collated, and the final scores
are compared to the cultural competency standards of the
Joint Commission, the main health care accreditation body in
the United States. The results help pinpoint where a hospital
might be having problems meeting the needs of its diverse
clientele.

"The nation is changing and rapidly becoming more diverse,"
says LaVeist. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by the
middle of this century, whites will be a racial minority of
the U.S. population; already there are four states —
Hawaii, California, New Mexico, and Texas — in which
whites are not the majority. "As the patient population
changes, health care organizations need to change to meet the
needs of different races, ethnicities, languages, cultures,
and countries of origin."

LaVeist says his is the most comprehensive assessment tool
of its type, and the only one that is Web based. "Much of
what's being done focuses on individuals, on training health
care providers to be culturally competent. But that approach
may not be as effective as we need it to be," says LaVeist.
"My approach is to try to create a culture within an entire
health care organization that is respectful in regards to the
diversity of the patients coming there."

At the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the international
call center receives more than 1,000 calls per month from
Hopkins units requesting language interpretation services.
But cultural competency goes beyond providing interpreters,
says Nadia Sawaya, program consultant for the cultural
competency program at Johns Hopkins Medicine International.
"We look at every encounter as an intercultural encounter,"
she says. "Cultural competency means looking at a patient's
beliefs, values, how they perceive illness, their views about
when to seek medical care. Everyone has the best intentions
to care for patients, but there are these nuances that come
into play."

The COA360 is currently being tested and could become
available to hospitals by this winter. Once it is complete,
LaVeist wants to develop a new Web site that takes cultural
competency one step further. He doesn't just want to measure
it. He wants to help hospitals work on areas where they
scored poorly.

"The next step is to create another site that deals with
intervention, to provide hospitals with guidance on how they
can improve," he says.— Maria Blackburn

This summer, the Johns Hopkins community learned that Nicole
Suveges, a graduate student in the Krieger School of Arts
and Sciences, had died in Iraq. She and 10 others,
including three Americans, were killed on June 24 when a bomb
exploded in the offices of the district council in the Sadr
City section of Baghdad.

Nicole Suveges

Suveges, 38, was working as a civilian political scientist,
advising the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry
Division. She was part of the Army's Human Terrain System
program, which embeds social scientists with military units
to help commanders better understand local populations.
According to BAE Systems, the defense company that employed
her, Suveges was helping to reduce violence and to rebuild
infrastructure in the area.

She was also researching her dissertation. Her adviser, Mark
Blyth, an associate professor of
political science at Johns Hopkins, says her academic
work focused on the process of transitioning from an
authoritarian regime, especially how that process affects
ordinary citizens. In 2006, Suveges spent a year in Iraq as
a civilian contractor and social science adviser to the
military, collecting data for her thesis. Her second tour in
Iraq would have supplied the rest of the data necessary to
begin writing.

University President William R. Brody told students, faculty,
and staff about the loss of "one of our own" in an
announcement the day after Suveges' death. "Members of the
Political Science Department describe Nicole as an
extraordinarily bright, engaging, kind person, intellectually
curious and outgoing," he said. "She also was known as an
active citizen of the department, regularly attending
seminars and helping to organize graduate student activities.
As a former Reserve soldier herself and as a person in her
mid-30s, she brought a different and valuable perspective to
the intellectual life of the department."

Brody continued, "Nicole was committed to using her learning
and experience to make the world a better place, especially
for people who have suffered through war and conflict. In
that, she exemplifies all that we seek to do at Johns
Hopkins: to use knowledge for the good of humanity."

Suveges is survived by her husband, retired Army Master Sgt.
David Iverson, her two stepdaughters, and her parents.Iverson
is creating the Nicole Suveges Fellowship at Johns Hopkins.
Though the planning is in the very early stages, he says the
fellowship will support national and international field work
for political science graduate students.— Catherine Pierre

For most of 18 centuries, China was a world power, a major
player in the global economy. But beginning with the First
Opium War, from 1839 to 1842, the country entered a long
period of national weakness. Now China has the world's
fastest growing major economy and continues to invest
significantly in modernizing its military.

David M. Lampton, director of China studies and dean of
faculty at the Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies, begins his
latest book, The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might,
Money, and Minds (University of California Press, 2008),
by adapting political theorist Joseph Nye's definition of
power as "the ability to define and achieve one's purposes or
goals." After speaking with dozens of senior policymakers,
mid-level officers, scholars, government officials, and
policy analysts in China, countries on its periphery, and the
United States, Lampton says it is clear that Chinese
officials are looking for modernization to boost not only
China's armed might, but also its economic and intellectual
power. In his view, the United States seems too concerned
about the first and insufficiently attentive to the rest. And
he thinks that is a mistake.

"Maybe since 9/11, maybe as a result of the Cold War, we
gradually put more importance on the coercive elements of
power," he says. "Seeing the largest [U.S.] problem with
China as its military is unwarranted." Lampton argues that
the U.S. should strengthen its own economic and intellectual
capabilities to keep up with China's dynamic population,
which now comprises 20 percent of the world's inhabitants. He
says his book is meant to serve as a "mirror in which
Americans can contemplate their own conception of power, its
uses, and its limitations."

Lampton notes that China still has a long way to go in
solving its internal problems. In his book, he cites several
obstacles to China's growth, among them demographic changes,
pollution, water scarcity and other resource issues, social
and leadership fragmentation, and gross energy demand. Taiwan
continues to loom as a potential problem, especially if a
conflict in the Taiwan Strait draws Beijing into military
confrontation with the United States. The recent earthquake
in Sichuan province shed light on a crumbling infrastructure,
some of it left over from the days of Mao Zedong, and a local
system of often corrupt officials whose only concern is
maximizing gross domestic product. Rapid growth has already
severely affected the environment within the country, Lampton
explains, and will increasingly affect the global
environment. "This is a long-term development problem that
for generations will keep the Chinese occupied internally,"
says Lampton. "They realize that if they can't fix those
problems, they won't remain in power."

Despite China's rising might, Lampton does not think there's
a large chance of an armed confrontation. The country's
internal problems are of such magnitude, he says, its leaders
will want to stay focused on domestic issues and resist
getting sucked into any external conflict. "I think honesty
requires that nobody can predict what something as large and
rapidly changing as China is going to be like 20 or 30 years
from now," Lampton says. "But if we treat China as a threat
today, we will create the reality we seek to avoid
tomorrow."— Rebecca Messner, A&S '08

Critically ill, bedridden patients often suffer from
profoundly atrophied muscles, the result of long hospital
stays with little exercise and large doses of pain
medications that keep them still. Even after recovering from
surgery, injury, or prolonged illness, many patients need
additional care because they have become too weak to
function. Bedridden patients are also more prone to
depression and bedsores. Studies by Dale Needham, assistant
professor of pulmonary
and critical care medicine at the School of Medicine,
have demonstrated that patients with life-threatening
respiratory ailments and other conditions enjoy better
outcomes when they begin rehab sooner. But intensive-care
patients often are unsteady on their feet, and must stay
connected to ventilators, heart monitors, and intravenous
lines. For a patient to simply rise from bed and walk a short
distance requires assistance from four hospital staff
members.

Engineering students designed this walker/chair/instrument
tower to help ICU patients get up and about sooner.
Photo by Will Kirk

Confounded by this problem, Needham challenged biomedical engineering
students at the Whiting School of Engineering to devise a
solution. The result is the MOVER, a combination walker,
wheelchair, and instrument tower that enables a patient to
walk with the help of only two people — a nurse in
front and a physical therapist behind.

Designed by a team of eight Whiting undergraduates over the
past year, MOVER tested the ingenuity of would-be engineers
by presenting them with a batch of problems. What materials
should the seat be made from? How could the walker best be
integrated with a chair to catch a patient who suddenly
becomes too weak to continue walking and has to sit down
abruptly? How big should the contraption's wheels be to
navigate hallways and avoid getting stuck in the floor slots
of elevator entryways?

The students came up with some novel solutions, such as using
bulletproof nylon for the seat because it is easy to clean
and resists infection. They also made the walker extend
farther behind the patient than a conventional model, to
ensure he or she has room to walk but can fall back into the
attached seat if necessary. Despite their ingenuity, the
device has yet to pass muster with Hopkins clinicians who
want more improvements before patients use it. "It's been a
very iterative process because we've constantly been told by
clinical people how we need to change the design," says
Joshua Lerman, Engr '08, the leader of the student team. "It
has gone back and forth from the shop to the hospital 12 or
13 times, which is good for the students because that's the
kind of thing we'll face when we're out in the world."

Needham is confident that the MOVER, once it passes a final
test or two, will catch on at Hopkins despite a medical
culture nationwide that has been slow to grasp the virtues of
incorporating regular rehab into a patient's recovery plan.
"The goal is to minimize the morbidities ICU patients face
when they leave the hospital," says Needham. "We're doing a
very good job of helping our patients survive. Now, we need
to do a better job of preparing them for when they leave
here."— MA

Jason Matheny was shocked to see huge industrial poultry
farms dotting the countryside of India. The public health
researcher was already concerned about the environmental
consequences of factory farming in the United States. Now
large metal sheds containing thousands of chickens pumped
with antibiotics and living in their own waste had come to
the East. Factory farming had gone global.

Illustration byRobert Neubecker

Some people might react by going local — eating organic
"slow" food, and campaigning for others to do the same.
Matheny instead decided to go to the lab. He thought he could
use technology to give consumers an alternative to
conventional meat. In 2004 he founded New Harvest, a
nonprofit research group devoted to developing in vitro meat.
Yes, that's meat grown in a lab, without a body attached.

"The idea of in vitro meat has been around a long time, but
it's only now that the technology is within reach to make
this a practical possibility," says Matheny, a PhD candidate
in health economics at the
Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Using tissue-engineering techniques, scientists regularly
grow small amounts of tissue in the lab for medical
procedures. To make in vitro meat, they use similar
techniques to culture animal cells, which they then grow in
a medium rich with nutrients. "Muscle tissue and connective
tissue needs to attach to something to grow properly,"
Matheny says. "To make tissue out of these cultured cells,
you have to grow them on a surface." One technique is to grow
the tissue on a sheet of material containing thin grooves.
The tissue cells align on these grooves and fuse to form
myotubes, which eventually form myofibers, the building
blocks of muscle. "The state of the art right now is creating
one square centimeter of this muscle tissue," Matheny
says.

Cost is the biggest roadblock to getting past
single-centimeter squares and growing in vitro meat in bulk,
he says. The current process is so labor intensive, the meat
costs thousands of dollars per pound. Matheny hopes that over
the next decade, automation and the development of a less
expensive growth medium for tissue cells will help bring the
cost in line with that of conventional meat. Last April,
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) offered a
$1 million prize to the first person to produce commercially
viable quantities of in vitro chicken at competitive prices
by June 30, 2012.

"The idea of in vitro meat has been around a long time,
but it's only now that the technology is within reach to make
this a practical possibility.— Jason Matheny

New Harvest, which gets its money from individual donations,
currently funds researchers at Utrecht University in the
Netherlands. "The Dutch are the only group working on this
technology full time," says Matheny, who is also New
Harvest's director. Scientists are focusing on developing in
vitro burgers and chicken nuggets instead of T-bone steaks
and drumsticks because ground meat is easier to engineer,
creates less waste, and is popular with consumers. "About
half of the meat we eat is ground," notes Matheny. He adds
that the flavor of in vitro meat should be comparable to that
of conventional meat. "Ground meat is made mostly of muscle,
fat, and connective tissue," he says. "We can make all of
that in vitro. The other ingredients added to ground meat,
like binder and seasoning, can similarly be added to cultured
meat."

Test tube meat has a number of potential advantages over
conventional ground meat, Matheny says. For example, it could
be engineered to be healthier and have a higher ratio of
so-called "good fat," like the fat in salmon. In vitro meat
could be produced under more hygienic conditions than those
found in slaughterhouses and packing houses. "And you aren't
producing the massive amounts of waste that we see in
traditional livestock production because you are only
producing the meat that eventually gets eaten," Matheny
says.

Matheny is a vegetarian. But when affordable in vitro meat
becomes available, he has every intention of wolfing down a
burger or a plate of chicken nuggets that began life in a
lab, he says. "It's the only kind of meat I would eat."— MB

"With the case of oil, our brain isn't wired, but our nation
has been rewired. Our national infrastructure has been wired
by cheap, plentiful oil. ...
The most important single driver to get people to quit
smoking is the rising cost of cigarettes. So with addictions,
whether it's cocaine, nicotine, or oil, money talks."